


The Toy Maker

by TheQuiet1



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Antagonistic Relationship, BDSM, Enemies to Friends, M/M, On opposite sides of the war, Stockholm Syndrome, Torture, Vampires, Violence, captor-bonding, vampire lore, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-09-27 19:02:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17167583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheQuiet1/pseuds/TheQuiet1
Summary: Please note the author has chosen: to not use the Archive warnings.  With the exception of the Underage tag, any of the other main categories may appear in this story.  Dark content





	The Toy Maker

**Author's Note:**

> Please note the author has chosen: to not use the Archive warnings. With the exception of the Underage tag, any of the other main categories may appear in this story. Dark content

 

  
*******

 

Mr. Dobson! A moment of your time.”

The sky is changing from black to a lighter hue. Erik hesitates, one foot poised on the threshold of his front step. London is loud behind him but London is always loud, even in the small hours. Across the road - inside a newly remodelled building - a painter lowers a drop-cloth to the floor; Erik listens to the sheet flutter, can smell the turpentine laid out in preparation. The steady metronome of the worker’s heartbeat makes his teeth itch. Jimsonweed grows behind the fence bordering his own, it’s nightshade flower curved like a white blade. The stars are dim overhead and at the end of the street – where the voice originated from - the engine of an armoured vehicle ticks over quietly as it waits. Government issue.

Resigned, Erik Dobson glances at the front door.

The house is a sanctuary, built for his senses and it is blessedly soundproof. He’s tempted to ignore the salutation; slip inside and shut the world out, have a hot meal but that would invite further scrutiny and he can’t afford it. Best to face them on the street then.

The meal – after all - isn’t sanctioned.

With a querulous expression Erik pivots. His posture (relaxed! Engaged!) is illuminated under the sodium street-lamps. “Mycroft Holmes and his…charge, Sherlock, I see…. This is unexpected.”

Mycroft is a tall man with a hooked nose, his hair ginger but with enough product in it to render it near brown. He couldn’t have been more than twenty when turned; there’s a softness to his body, a perpetual roundness to his face, and an exacting demeanour that crushes any sign of puerility. Appearances aside, he is immeasurably old.

Sherlock, in comparison, is dark with a head full of question marks; his hair a mass of wild curls. He moves in fits and starts, unnatural stillness followed by a flurry of activity. Tics, Erik thinks bemused, as if he’s bursting at the seams. The whelp couldn’t be more than two hundred: potential leverage, if one knew how to apply it.

But what surprises Erik most, is they’re together in the first place, when it’s rumoured they go to such lengths to avoid one another. Softly, Erik appraises: “There is gossip abound, sir, about the likes of you.”

Sherlock, scanning the opposite building, goes still.

Mycroft smiles thinly. “There are matters we need to discuss, Erik, at length. Notably the events of Tuesday morning.”

“You mean the little tidbit I caught? The girl obviously took an illegal substance, a drug of some kind; I can’t be held accountable if my meal was tainted at the source. As the catch-phrase says – we are what we eat - but I do apologise if the result appeared... unseemly.”

“But she wasn’t your blood meal, was she?” Startled, Erik re-evaluates his original appraisal and wonders at the accuracy of those rumours. Sherlock’s voice is a shock, a low baritone that burrows into the subconscious. “She was simply walking down the street, running errands for Councilman Gerald. She tripped on a broken section of the pavement, went down hard. She skinned her right knee.”

The memory is livid. The shock in her eyes; the curious pause - how every man of kin froze in place, like wind-down toys – one: two: three seconds of absolute silence, then she was swarmed.

Screams startled the roosting Nightjars from the trees. Her clothes were torn.

At the time, Erik was the oldest on the street and the spoils were his. His mouths floods: sodden with saliva, his eye teeth have descended. He’s starving. A gaunt man standing on the front porch of his home - on the precipice of safety - and it doesn’t matter how much he eats he is always starving.

Every meal since Tuesday has been rendered unsatisfying.

It takes unnaturally long to shake himself from the memory and reorder his wits. They are both watching. “If this is to be a discussion of length it should wait for an appropriate time. It’s early, gentlemen. Return to your vehicle while you can, unless you prefer a crisp tan.”

“Invite us in, then,” Sherlock says, clearly bored. His eyes bore onto Erik’s. “Now.”

The order rattles in his skull; redoubles in volume, like a breaking flood it smothers the synapses between surrender and resolve. Erik bites down hard with his teeth, enough to tear his lip bloody. He imagines his mouth is a jail cell, his fangs the iron bars. The words are caught in his throat, imprisoned under the bedrock of his tongue, locked in by his will. He is older, more powerful than the whelp standing beside Mycroft, he won’t yield to a compulsion of another mind and yet... “Come inside,” Erik gasps.

Woodenly, he swipes his hand over the palm-lock.

Sherlock inclines his head, mouth curved upward, smug.

The sanctuary door opens, heavy and silent on its runner; from inside sounds escape: the sigh of silk on thigh, a rustle as a body moves against bedsheets; three separate drumbeats, frantic with distress, and over it all the smell of putrefaction.

Mycroft looks at his companion. “There is some etiquette to observe, Sherlock, when dealing with your elders. You don’t simply bully them.”

“Sun is breaking. Do you want to be standing on the front porch when it happens?” Sherlock breaks eye contact to glare at Mycroft instead. The compulsion to obey fizzles out and with it Erik staggers, his mind howling a silent protest: Not possible, he thinks, dazedly.

Sherlock peers over his shoulder, trying to see into the house proper. “By the stench of it someone exceeded their monthly quota. I would have suspected Mycroft for gluttony, not you Councilman.”

Eight steps up, one and a half-metres to the front door. It’s been so difficult to reorganise his thoughts, Erik’s’s been bogged in a quagmire for days. The smell of them, foul with excrement and sweat, heavy with blood, yanks at his feet. Before he can turn instinct into motion and move inward, upward, Sherlock catches him by both forearms. He stands torso to torso, uncomfortably close, and examines Erik as if he’s a particularly interesting bug. “Relax now, Councilman.”

Acutely aware of those rumoured abilities, Erik squeezes both eyes shut, trying to keep that honey-trap voice out.

“You were correct earlier: we are what we eat. For instance my maker fed me only rats for the first fifty years of my life. Can you imagine? Scurrying down in the dungeons, running from bolt-hole to bolt-hole: chained at the foot? Knowing you were something more once -unique - and now were so much less? Your thoughts, emotions, precious intellect dimmed into nothingness. He thought it was funny. Seeing me like that. He said it was ‘a lark.’

“We are what we eat. But we are also the palimpsest; the impression our fore-makers etched into our DNA. Abilities run in blood-lines but the more companions we turn the more diluted the power becomes. My maker didn’t like sharing; his abilities were for him alone. He didn’t need company. Or desire friendship. He wouldn’t weaken his position by creating another of his ilk and didn’t; for him, whole millennia’s passed by. He was insane when he found me in 1883. Quite insane. But I was the first human he turned – and he – he was my first blood.”

Sherlock smiles, and Erik thinks he can see it, the shared madness like a sun flare in his grey eyes. The terrible power they would have wielded.

“You are my senior by six centuries but you are not, sir, my better. Your masters multiplied like vermin on a ship. Your abilities are pale, Mr. Dobson. So squeeze your eyes shut all you want but you shall answer: was the girl truly drugged? An enhancement? Were you, with the decorum of your many years, rendered mindless?”

It feels like a crown circlet around his temples, a ratchet that tightens with each word, until his skull is split open and his secrets spilled. He haemorrhages words like a wound. “I could smell the injury when she fell; such an innocuous thing, a skinned knee, isn’t it? But her scent…Christ, her smell. I tore off every limb on her body. I drained her to a husk. Her head…her head’s still inside. I walked down Regent Street with it clasped in my hand, her hair knotted in my fist. I kept it. I can’t stop licking at the flesh...”

Mycroft recoils, revulsion clear on his face.

“The question,” Sherlock presses.

“There were no drugs. Alcohol. Only alcohol. I could taste it when I fed. It’s why she tripped on the sidewalk, I imagine. She was drunk as a skunk.”

Mycroft digs the umbrella into the pavement, head tipped toward the sky. Behind him, there are the first streaks of dark purple, the hues of royalty and bruises to come: “Yes, well. Her partner – Clara – confirmed they met at Leopold’s to celebrate their anniversary. Shared a bottle of wine, had the anti pesto, went their separate ways at 12:45 am. Ms. Sullivan returned to their property to sleep, in preparation for her day job. Harriet Watson was returning to Councilman Gerald, to resume her night duties as his secretary when she tripped. Your little massacre was captured on camera: uploaded to YouTube via multiple sources. For pity’s sake, Erik, you are six hundred years old! You showed all the restraint and reasoning of a gnat! That girl was drawn and quartered on a common street in the full view of London!”

Mycroft stalks forward, his face terrifying with its cold fury. “You’ve turned this into a bloody recruitment campaign for the Liberation Front!”

“It wasn’t my fault. She was different. I’m not some yearling —“

“Oh, do shut up,” Sherlock says, irritably. Erik’s mouth snaps closed. “I was going to ask for a blood sample but you’ve fed since, haven’t you? After you drained Ms. Watson dry? Used your rations and more, now there’s no evidence of her left in your system. A tissue sample then. You said you had her head? Where?”

It’s Erik’s turn to recoil; possessiveness drops over him like a haze. “What about the Centres? Every citizen donates on a tri-monthly basis. There must be a blood sample somewhere.”

It’s how he’s spent the last two working days; using government credentials to track down her deposits. Erik’s been reimagining her taste for days – but none of what he’s found is comparable. It doesn’t hold a candle to the original source. He curses his own lack of foresight because he could have delayed her death, kept Watson alive for much longer, instead he fell on the girl like she was chum in a shark frenzy.

“Serial number 2908763: Type O-negative. I suspect the blood collected is not hers though. The after-impressions on the palate speak of…multiple viewpoints…either that or she had a dissociative personality disorder.”

“You’ve pulled her bags already,” Erik says, dully. All of his fruitless searching for naught.

Mycroft shrugs. “Clara Sullivan was registered as a nurse at the Mulgrove Centre. A curiously well placed job if one were inclined to ‘fiddle with the accounts’, as it were. She’s been arrested. The charges pending include misnaming of blood vials and the wilful tampering of government records. Given the amount of media coverage on her recently deceased spouse, I doubt Ms Sullivan will be executed for her deception, clemency might be best.”

Erik doesn’t take much from the conversation – his attention skips upstairs, to the warm bodies, it staggers across the road like a drunkard, to where the painter works in his derelict building, heart-rate steadysteadysteady – the only thing Erik gleans from Mycroft is that there is nothing left of Harriet Watson.

The desiccated and rotting flesh inside has no blood to yield. But it is his, and the want/need/possessiveness wont release its death-grip. It. Is. His. “There must be another sample. Other pieces of the carcass?”

“Corpse you mean, an animal is a carcass,” Sherlock corrects. “And no. It turned into a common melee after you left.”

Erik has masturbated to the image of tiny Harriet, enfolded in his arms; has seen footage of the riot that occurred afterward, when he realised there was nothing left in her veins and started tearing at joints, skin, muscle fibres instead. He thought the government had taken the rest of the video down, tagged as inflammatory, but it wasn’t done quickly enough to stop the beheadings in Basra, or the kidnappings of their brethren in Lyon. There’s been a surge in HLF recruitment, the dark Web filled with propaganda.

London is safe, isolated in its moat of water.

London is the seat and heart of Council power.

“I don’t have time to track down her wayward foot!” Sherlock snaps. “Not when I know you have her head! Give me a tissue sample! I need to run tests.”

Mycroft leans forward to examine the shine on the point of his shoe. “It’s best if we can supply – or manufacture – a story regarding the brutality of her death. Especially at the hands of someone as old as yourself. Your drug excuse may well work, Erik. If a new chemical has interfered in how we process food, then your reactions were incited. If that is true: then we need to find out where it came from, who produced it, and tighten the laws regarding humans.”

“You’re not spinning a story for the constituency here, Mycroft, or expanding your power. He already said it wasn’t a drug. So if you don’t mind, stop talking out of your arse and from this point forward, keep your buttocks clenched.”

“Sherlock mine – “

“But I’m not, am I?”

Mycroft’s fingers curl around the umbrella. He blinks once, sloth-slow.

The Holmes line took its stock from a single human tree; and in return, protected its wealth and estate over generations. Meanwhile the humans married, had children, grew up, grew fat; withered and died, until a descendent worthy of immortality was found. Rumours were, Mycroft had waited centuries. Rumours were, someone else poached from his human tree.

The Holmes’ line didn’t make kin lightly, like Moriarty, their power amassed because of it.

There are Houses who have multiplied so voraciously their abilities have dwindled into an echo of their true selves, little more than porphyria. Sherlock shares a human surname with Mycroft, has the Elder’s protection, but by Council law he isn’t kin; not in the way their kind defines it.

The disquiet between the two men is palpable, like magnets placed in proximity they are violently repelled by each other.

Mycroft coughs: “Be that as it may, I for one do want to know why Erik reacted like a day-old Childe with his first teething meal.”

The rebuke shifts the argument.

Erik sways as both men refocus their attention. He shouldn’t fold with such alacrity – he’s head of his House - but he can’t muster the will to protest. “For what it’s worth I compelled her not to fight. She didn’t have to make a fuss in public, but she struggled, Mycroft, and kept struggling so provocatively. She squirmed…like prey.”

A line forms between Sherlock’s eyebrows: “What? You said compelled. Your exact choice of word is ‘compelled.’ Then how did she —?” A bullet collapses Sherlock’s right lung. It splinters the breast-bone into fragments, while the question is still half-formed. Stupidly, he looks downward.

The exit wound is a pulpy mess, a through and through at a severe angle. The impact staggers him forward by a half-measure. Silver, he thinks, the casing consecrated by holy water, something else inside the mix, something excruciating. He has a millisecond, maybe two, before the agony hits and when it does, it razes every question from Sherlock’s mind.

Standing directly in front of him, the bullet left Sherlock’s body and struck Erik Dobson in the left pectoral. It’s not a small wound. The bullet is not a neat, cylindrical object anymore.

It punches through Erik’s heart like a steel fist.

Close as they are, Sherlock gets a glimpse of disbelief on Erik’s face, then both his fists clench inward on nothing. Sherlock staggers, his balance offset; around him dusty remains peter to the ground, soft as a rainfall, as Sherlock collapses onto the porch steps. There’s a zing. Stone chips ricochet off the pavement, slicing his cheekbone and face. He’s choking on dust – choking on Erik’s remains – and can’t see around the agony in his chest.

Distantly, he hears Mycroft shout. The door to Erik’s Dobson’s mansion yawns open.

His – (not kin) - ‘benefactor’, Sherlock supposes, hauls him up bodily by the armpits; saving Sherlock’s life or perhaps in need of a shield. Suffice to say, it hadn’t helped Erik Dobson any.

Together, they stumble toward the open door. The second bullet catches Sherlock closer to the spine. The velocity the same, the trajectory a fraction off. It punches through him like a wooden stake and, like Dobson, hits Mycroft in the kill zone. Sherlock writhes, soundless, his right lung deflated and no air left with which to scream.  The deferred impact staggers Mycroft. They tilt, knocked off course.

Inside the foyer of the house, the keypad to the door looms large and Mycroft punches at it.

With a ponderous sigh, the door eases shut. Outside, the sky is mauve with a single dagger of gold cresting the horizon.

Pinned under Sherlock’s weight, Mycroft collapses, both of them sprawled haphazardly on the parquet floor.

A chandelier is positioned overhead, the electric lights glow soft orange as the motion senses kick in one by one. The house is hermetically sealed, solid as a mausoleum.

Inside, the property has an air of curios, artefacts line the mantlepiece: on the adjacent wall a series of drawn profiles become sepia photos, merge into black and white portraits, and become colour, Erik Hobson caught and rendered in pictures throughout the ages. The furniture is heavy, upholstered with a flower motif that wouldn’t look out of place in a retirement village. Where a kitchen can normally be found in the heart of a house, there is a simple long table instead. A refrigerator, tucked away in one corner, hums quietly.

Dishevelled, Mycroft rolls the other man off and pats at his own body.

There’s a sizeable hole in the left side of his shirt. The second bullet which pierced Sherlock through is half-embedded in his ballistic vest. Mycroft’s fingers scrape at the hot metal as he plucks it free, the casing slippery with Sherlock’s blood.

Holy water. Consecrated silver. More worryingly: evidence of wood splinters loaded inside the metal jacket. It crumples apart under his fingertips.

“Praise he didn’t attempt a head shot,” Mycroft murmurs. Beside him Sherlock moans; his short nails leave gouges in the patterned wood as he scrabbles as the floor. His grey eyes have gone hunter yellow, animalistic; his teeth have descended.

He was older than Mycroft when turned; almost thirty, and his body is immortalised in its prime, none of which is healing. Sherlock is riddled with sawdust and until it is flushed from his system the wounds will not close. His only saving grace is that he was standing with his back to the shooter, his wounds the mirror opposite to Erik’s heart shot.

Erik, who is dead: six hundred years of experience and amassed knowledge obliterated in a second.

Mycroft kneels upright, one hand on Sherlock’s chest to stop the random flailing. He rifles through the younger man’s pockets until he finds the mobile, extracts it, and places three calls in quick succession.

There are lists.

Who would have the funds and ambition to organise an assassination? The Human Liberation Front sits at the top, the most likely culprit, but there are rival Houses, too, feuds that date back centuries. A painter setting up his work station in the pre-dawn hours was not an unusual activity; Mycroft himself had noted the steady heartbeat, but dismissed it, half the population works nights. Nothing in London stops, the city made for twenty-four convenience.

Was he a soldier? A HLF radical? An enthralled companion, following his master’s order?

There are intelligence reports Mycroft has sat on, kept confidential, that reveal the well in Carrickfergus has been disturbed. Mycroft isn’t one to dismiss a coincidence out of hand.

Below, Sherlock snarls, pushing at the hand pinning him to the ground, the sound so reminiscent of the abomination Mycroft found at the bottom of Moriarty’s dungeon. He had a mind to kill Sherlock then - out of pity’s sake - and too much empathy to follow through. “Hush,” Mycroft admonishes, gently. “We can flush the wood out. There’s no need for dramatics.”

It takes concentration to stand. His legs feel wobbly. Mycroft peels the bloody shirt from his chest with distaste, but leaves his personal armour on. He can’t hear anything on the street, doesn’t know if his driver is alive, if the armoured car had moved position, or if it’s now blocking the doorway. Nothing from outside can be heard and so it follows, too, the opposite is true.

He turns his eyes toward the winding staircase. There will be a bathroom and shower upstairs.

After the wood is flushed, or tweezed out, Sherlock will need to replenish his lost supplies. Vampire blood would promote a faster rate of healing - preferably his maker’s - but they are not kin and some instincts can’t be bridged. Certain rules remain inviolate. Besides, he can hear the drumming heartbeats of Lord Dobson’s unsanctioned meal from upstairs.

“Needs must, Sherlock-mine.”

 

***

 

John Watson was six when his family was split down the middle, one parent paired for each child.

John’s born in central London and smuggled over the sea; raised under desert skies, with a landscape that’s treacherous, shifting underfoot. He dismantles guns, learns to read, grows up with Baharat fragrant in the air and on his tongue. He sits cross-legged at morning, watching the raptors plunge downward on a draft, turn on a wingtip. He grows into a tidy child, small in stature and quick to offer his help. His mother, Dr. Eleanor Watson, supplements his education with field medicine and whatever books she can find.

War and deprivation, oddly, sit well on her shoulders. Half the men in camp fall in love.

“Why?” John had moaned, when they first left London. He was miserable at sea. There was an ache, a void, where Harry should be.

“Because you’ve got a solid head, Johnny. They can’t get inside it.”

Indignant, John said. “I’m not thick!”

She had laughed. “Oh, don’t put words in my mouth, love. Let’s see. You know Mozzie’s can twist your thoughts around, right; make humans do things they don’t want to? Sometimes, if they’re really old, they can order each other as well. But Harry and you are special. Mozzie’s can buzz around your ear, whispering all sorts of nonsense; but they can’t change your thoughts. They can’t bend your knee. You’re my golden pair.” Her hair was curling in the breeze, there wasn’t a speck of blonde anywhere on her body. John had her nose though - the same frank assessment in his eyes.

“Are you special too?”

Her smile dimmed. John had seen that look often in London, on multiple people, like there was a horror story written on the back of their eyelids. “My mother was. Sometimes it skips a generation. But I don’t want those Mozzie’s getting a whiff of you, nor Harry, so it’s best if you’re not found together, yeah?”

“Did Harry leave London?” Australia, he muses, or maybe Africa. The hot places are best. Where the ground is baked; the sun worshipped for its devastation.

“I’m sure Dad and her both.”

He was twelve when Eleanor died. A human sentry, enthralled, opened the gates to their compound with a smile and let the Mozzie’s march inside.

He was thirteen when first bitten: the Mozzie whispered ‘Calm down, little one. Sleep. It won’t hurt.’ John had thrashed, cried out, fought ever harder.

When the Mozzie - exasperated at a meal that wouldn’t sit still - finally bit down it *had* hurt. Terribly. But on a scale of one to ten it was nothing to the pain that followed; when the vampire took in a shuddering mouthful and went ballistic. His teeth bore inward like twin daggers, claws tore at the edges of John’s shoulder wound, trying to make it gape.

He was thirteen when Major Sholto saved his life.

Two years later, with a sniper rifle in hand and an east wind blowing fiercely at his back, he swatted his first Mozzie in the sands of Kandahar. Major Sholto nodded; with no overt emotion on his face he had signed quickly: Good shot. We’ll make a soldier out of you yet.

John basked in it. In the odd silence of his new commander, the camaraderie of his unit; in the rustle of his backpack as he jogged down a sand dune. Like Eleanor before him, like a palimpsest on DNA and history, war suited him to the bone.

He was six when his family split up and fled the home-country – him and Harry were two weeks away from their first mandatory donation.

 

***

 

Later.

 

 

Disgruntled, Sherlock turns the amputated head over in his hands. He had found it earlier, left neatly at the end of the long table, when there was a refrigerator in perfect order half a step away!

“The HLF have turned her into a martyr. A Collaborator with badly dyed hair. She never did anything noteworthy in life. A nobody. Why would they decree her a saint?” He peers into her milky eyes as if expecting an answer to shake itself loose.

He has used Dobson’s shower twice in the interim. Mycroft had shoved the shower nozzle straight through the wound, chasing the bullets trajectory, stretching the hole obscenely. Sawdust splattered against the grout tile with a great gust of water: Sherlock remembers screaming once, then nothing. He awoke much later, tacky with human blood, and panted through a different set of memories, his body nauseous and his mind infected with alien emotion. The sound of Mycroft moving downstairs had stirred him into activity eventually. He stood. He had showered again. Now he is curled up on Erik Dobson’s couch, clad in a stolen sheet. His bare toes curl and uncurl on the armrest. He tosses Harriet Watson’s head from one hand to another.

“Could you please remove that rotting flesh from my vicinity? It’s rather on the nose, Sherlock.”

There are no more drumbeats. Apart from their voices, the house is blessedly silent.

“Why keep it? Dobson has been poisoning himself, licking at ‘dead man’s’ flesh for days. No wonder his mental defences were weak, he could barely string two thoughts together.” Sherlock raises the head aloft, as if in salut. “Had you meet her, Mycroft? In the Council offices? Or at Westminster, perhaps?”

“Once that I can recall, she was in the company of Gerald; there was nothing about her that spoke aloud. She was plain.”

“A nobody,” Sherlock asserts.

“Or a well placed spy.” Mycroft crosses his ankles. “Erik Dobson’s heart was obliterated. A kill shot made from considerable distance, and through the bulk of your own body mass no less. That takes luck. Or an extraordinary amount of skill.”

“Nerves of steel,” Sherlock demurs.

“Or a suicidal disposition. Clearly she was somebody.”

Sherlock swings his legs off the couch and sits up. He places the head on the coffee-table with a reverence that belies the earlier game of catch, and disappears into Erik’s home-office. He re-emerges with a laptop under one arm.

“What are you doing?”

“Research. Breaking into her personnel records. Family history. Work ethics. As you said, someone other than Clara must have cared.”

“Whomever that is: he or she is running, and they have plenty of daylight on their side. Leave the foot chase to the enthralled, Sherlock-mine, concentrate on the DNA analysis.”

“Your goons? I was shot, Mycroft! Twice! And I daren’t leave it with Lestrade; he couldn’t find his own arse with both hands in his back pockets.”

“If you were the intended target, the first bullet would have pierced your heart. Obliviously you weren’t of any importance to the shooter.”

“Well, he certainly has my full attention.”

Mycroft sits perfectly straight, the only concession to the hour is the drowsiness to his eyes. He thinks about the intelligence report from Carrickfergus, the protection he extended all those years ago, the disturbed ground at the bottom of the well. In the shower it was Mycroft who had slaughtered the first human, cutting the man so he would bleed out slowly, the wrecked forearm held above Sherlock’s open mouth. Under normal circumstances the younger vampire wouldn’t partake; he was notoriously difficult with food, and would never indulge within Mycroft’s sight. Given his origins, the early years spent in Moriarty’s company, Mycroft didn’t begrudge him some fussiness over his meals but it hadn’t taken more than a few drops before instinct stirred. Mycroft was wise enough to let Sherlock be then; to make his own presence scarce.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say something aloud, make his supposition known, but Sherlock’s face is bright with interest, distracted by his little game of intrigue.

“You could have chosen more appropriate attire when rummaging through Erik’s room. A sheet is hardly decent.”

Sherlock grimaces with distaste. “His clothes do not fit.”

Which is to say, the style of clothing was not to his personal liking. The glow of the laptop lights up Sherlock’s features in an underwater shimmer, he’s already a thousand miles away, engrossed in code-breaking.

 

***

 

Two quick raps against the metal door herald a gruff shout: “Oi, open up!”

Sherlock could be carved from marble for all the mobility he shows.

With an inward sigh, Mycroft finds the household remote and, well clear of the foyer, cracks the sliding door open a fraction, letting both sunlight and Lestrade through. There’s a five o’clock shadow on the detectives face; his hair a ruffled birds nest. His clothes are ill-fitting, a coffee stain is prominent on the knee of his trouser leg.

“Starting or finishing?” Mycroft asks, politely.

“Starting. I heard it come over the wire on the way to work. My team is taking over from Caroline.”

“Good. What does forensics have?”

“To be honest, not a lot. We found his nest on the second window of the third floor, along with an L115A3 with it’s A-frame, but Anderson’s not pulling up prints. Aside from Dobson, there were no other persons on the street other than yourselves, and this is a Moz – ”

“If you are about to refer to my kind as a ‘Mosquito’, Detective Lestrade, I strongly advise you to reconsider.”

“ – a vampire estate,” Lestrade finishes without pause. “Blinds and shutters were closed in the pre-dawn hours, as per usual. We found your armoured vehicle, door open, sidearm discarded on the asphalt. If there was dust – “

“Ash,” Sherlock murmurs, not looking up from his computer. “I know ash.”

“Then your driver blew away in the wind before forensics got here.”

“CCTV?”

Lestrade scratches at his jawline. “Not set up yet. The estate is still being developed and ‘outside’ security is considered a low priority. Humans don’t tend to break into your homes; and generally speaking, your lot don’t like it being known if they bring someone back…do they?”

Mycroft turns his head to regard the human, his face reptilian cold. “Go on.”

“The borders are closed to outbound human traffic but that won’t sit well for long. ‘Sides, there’s nothing to say our shooter wants to leave the country. He could be taking a stroll up to the Lake District for all we know.” Lestrade trails off, looking from one to another. He scrubs his palm over his nape vigorously. “Lookit, I know things went down rather quickly, but neither of you saw the shooter? A glimpse? Not even a whiff of his scent?  Something that we can use to track him?”

“Turpentine,” Sherlock says from behind his computer screen. “I could hear his heartbeat from across the road but I could only smell turpentine. He was perfectly calm. Even when he pulled the trigger the pulse didn’t falter”

“It’s a rather distinct and overpowering scent,” Mycroft allows. “And it masked his own completely. He maintained a suppressing fire until we were locked inside the house.”

“Airtight and soundproof.” Sherlock’s mouth curves upward, into the suggestion of a smile. “He didn’t leave the nest – or the turpentine - until we were locked inside. Not a complete idiot, my shooter.”

Lestrade looks at him strangely for the possessive. “Great. So no ID, no prints, and no scent. Not much to go on, really.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Sherlock says, gleefully.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
